NewsGator Technologies, Inc. has acquired NetNewsWire, a RSS reader for Mac OS X. NewsGator also announced that NetNewsWire will integrate tightly with the NewsGator Online synchronization platform. Brent Simmons, the creator of NetNewsWire, will be joining the NewsGator team as a product architect.

The NewsGator Online platform provides a highly integrated and synchronized reading/viewing experience across multiple devices, including the web, mobile phones, televisions, and e-mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook. The recent FeedDemon acquisition extended this to the Windows desktop, and now with NetNewsWire RSS reader for Mac OS X, the platform extends to the Mac desktop as well.

"Many of our online customers who are Mac users have asked if we had plans to extend our product platform to the Mac desktop," said Greg Reinacker, founder and CTO of NewsGator. "NetNewsWire is the dominant RSS application for the Mac OS, and was an obvious choice for us. We’re very excited to integrate our advanced synchronization and other capabilities into the product and roll it out to our combined customer base."

"After hearing so many NetNewsWire users ask for synchronization – not just between copies of NetNewsWire, but with their PDAs, with newsreaders on Windows, with a browser-based service – we thought about how to make this happen, and found that NewsGator had the technology already in place," said Brent Simmons, co-founder and partner of Ranchero Software. "But they didn’t have a Mac client! So it was a perfect fit, and we couldn’t be more excited."

NetNewsWire was first released in 2002, with a high adoption by Mac users. NetNewsWire is available in both free and paid versions, both of which will continue to be developed and enhanced with new features and capabilities.

As part of this deal, existing NetNewsWire full-version customers will receive a free 2-year paid subscription to NewsGator Online. More details will be announced with the next release of NetNewsWire, which will include advanced features and functions from NewsGator Online.